Gutsy woes

I upgraded to Gutsy RC last week, and I've really had nothing but trouble,
and submitted lots of bugs (which is what you
are supposed to do with a release candidate, but with only a few days left
to go, I'm wondering how many of these are really gonna get fixed in
time). Some of these may be particularly related to Kubuntu/KDE, and some
might be due to not having a clean install, I don't know.

The upgrade
tool failed -- in fact I've never ever had a 'dist-upgrade' go
smoothly, despite the advertising. In my case after the tool failed, I had
to manually do 'aptitude dist-upgrade' 3 times before
everything was finally sorted out. Dist-upgrading is simply not for
novices. I guess the problem is that people do it so infrequently, and test
cases are so massively time consuming to set up, that it is never properly
tested in the real world.

Even when I get the nVidia drivers it working, I still have X crashing on me
when using Compiz. It only happens when I'm doing lots of
things at once -- some changes in window activity at the same time as doing
something in the background that is disk and CPU intensive (e.g. installing
software). But this is still unacceptable for a default option.

Compiz-fusion itself is quite nice (I've found a combination of plugins
that works very nicely, giving me a nicely animated 2x4 desktop, plus 'Expo'
and nice Alt-Tab mechanisms, with all my normal shortcuts for moving windows
around). However, KDE integration is pretty bad -- whether I use the 'KDEWM'
environment setting to start Compiz, or put something in ~/.kde/Autostart, I
end up with lots of problems: the KDE window decorator dies
at startup, and randomly dies at other times too;
some windows that appear at startup, especially the prompt for the KDE
Wallet, don't actually ever appear; using KDEWM, the 'Alt-F1', 'Alt-F2' KDE
shortcuts don't work. The only safe method I've found is to do a manual 'compiz
--replace' after my session is completely restored.

What's left of the advertised benefits of Kubuntu Gutsy? Well, there is
Dolphin -- but I already had that before. There is 'Restricted Drivers
Manager' -- great, except that it completely failed with the nVidia drivers
as described above. There is a newer version of strigi, but is no better
than it has been in the past -- it is alpha quality software really (things like the daemon refusing to stop etc, dying randomly, and the interface being
extremely basic compared to Beagle. Actually, it currently dies whenever I
tell it start indexing, so it is basically useless. And this problem reoccurs after purging the indexes and starting again, after indexing about 300,000 documents).

There was one really good thing -- 'Suspend' actually works on this
non-laptop computer, for the first time. At least, it worked when using the
normal 'nv' video driver---it didn't with the nVidia driver. I'm not
hopeful that it will even if I get nVidia drivers properly sorted out.
Which means that I'll either be choosing between the ability to have 3D
accelerated graphics, and being able to suspend.

In conclusion --- there is nothing so far in Kubuntu Gutsy that I would
have upgraded for. If the bugs above aren't fixed soon, then I would definitely
be far better off with Feisty, but I'm still hopeful that the guys at Ubuntu may
be able to get some of these sorted out.

UPDATE: Ubuntu 7.10 is upon us, and none of the above are addressed. I'm wondering how difficult it is to downgrade...

UPDATE 3: Thanks to help on a bug report, I got my nVidia modules to stop disappearing, result! Some genius also got BibleTime fixed up (had to compile from source, but it was worth it). X crashing got worse -- twice in 10 minutes yesterday -- so I've abandoned it again until the bug is fixed. But my system is basically all working now, and both Hibernate and Suspend now work perfectly, which is a real time/power saver, so I'm happy again :-)